In the Heart of a Queen
by Cynder2013
Summary: There is another school for those wayward children who don't want to go home, who want to get back to their lives in the "real" world and forgot all about their travels. And who else could be their headmistress but the queen of forgetting magical journeys? (Rated T because the Wayward Children books are not for kids, not because of this story's content.)


In the Heart of a Queen

The phone call happened every month. Sometimes it was Eleanor who, looking for news, picked up the phone and dialed the number with an area code in Maine that had been in service for more than a decade, but more often that was her counterpart's job. Eleanor, who was well into her fifties but looked as if she had just passed twenty-five, had no real use for such things as consistent communication. The world she had travelled wasn't in the habit of making a place for everything and everything in its place, high Nonsense was like that, and keeping in touch the way that her counterpart wanted to was very everything-placing. Of course, the headmistress of the other school had traveled to a world of high Logic. How else would she know the cleanest ways to help her students forget?

So, once a month, Eleanor would answer her private phone and she and the woman on the other end would exchange news about their schools and their students. Sometimes Eleanor would even get a new recipe. It was quite nice for both of them to talk to someone who understood the trials of caring for their wayward children, though they went about it very different ways.

This month, Eleanor made the call. The phone was answered after one ring and a softly accented voice reached Eleanor's ear. "Hello? Eleanor?"

"Susan-Queenie, how are you?" Eleanor asked.

Susan sighed. "Eleanor dear, I think I've gotten another one of your students. She's been crying every night wanting to go home."

"Oh dear," Eleanor said. "Are you sure she means _home_ home and not parents' home?"

"Quite sure. She keeps asking me why her door won't open."

"Oh dear," Eleanor said again. "We really must find a way to stop making these mistakes. It's ever so hard on the children."

Susan agreed. She knew that from experience.

"We'll have to get her transferred to you for next semester," Susan said, "unless she finds her door here, of course. Then I suppose I'll have to take a leaf out of your book, if I can manage it." She had a little too much experience with her husband leaving without word only to pop up months later as part of a circus act to take runaways seriously. That was what she got for marrying a Nonsense traveller, and an American one at that.

Eleanor told Susan about one of her students, a rare boy who had gone to one of the Drowned Worlds and come back with the ability to understand the speech of turtles. Susan could practically hear Eleanor smiling as she talked about the turtles he'd introduced to the fish pond on the grounds of her school.

"Has anyone gone home?" Susan asked.

"Not since last year," Eleanor said. "I'm not sure if that should worry me or not. Perhaps some of my past students have gone home since they graduated."

"Perhaps," Susan said.

"Lundy has a theory—"

"I want to go home!" Susan interrupted Eleanor with a wail. "Oh Eleanor, why won't He let me go home? You know I never really forgot Him. I didn't love Him as much as Lucy did, but no one could ever love Him as much as Lucy! Why did they get to go back but I didn't?"

Susan hung onto the edge of her desk with one hand and sobbed into the carpet. Eleanor waited until the heart-wrenching crying had died down to the occasional hiccup before she tried to say anything important.

"Susan-Queenie? What is it that your lion said about always being a queen?"

Susan sniffed. "Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia."

"So," Eleanor said, "doesn't that mean that He knows that you always loved him? How could you always be His queen if you didn't?"

Susan was silent for a moment. What Eleanor said was incredibly logical for a Nonsense traveller, and by that virtue alone had to be true. It did seem, from her recollection, like the sort of thing Aslan would have meant.

"I do miss them so," Susan said quietly. "I miss home."

"I know," Eleanor said. "We all do."

Susan laughed. "And those books don't help. My siblings never died, they just went home. I should never have talked to that man."

"Can't go back in this world, there's nothing you can do now."

Susan wiped away a few lingering tears and nudged Eleanor into telling another story about one of her students. After the two headmistresses had talked for a few more minutes, Susan hung up the phone. She straightened her hair and touched up her lipstick armor before leaving her office to join her wayward children for supper.


End file.
